Method and apparatus for non-invasive diagnosis of cardiovascular and related disorders

Apparatus and method for non-invasive diagnosis of cardiovascular and related disorders. The system establishes a correspondence between the dynamics of the wave contour of the arterial pressure pulse and the associated disease states. The system comprises an input module, a contour signal receiver, and a processing module. The input module utilizes a pressure transducer for taking a non-invasive measurement of the arterial pulse. The contour signal receiver amplifies, digitizes and normalizes the arterial pressure pulse signal. In the processing module, the normalized arterial pressure contour is subjected to wavelet analysis, which transforms the dynamics of the time series of arterial blood pressure contour into multi-resolution wavelet coefficients or signatures. The processing module includes a neural network which is trained to associate the diagnostic features of the transformed arterial pressure contour embedded in the coefficients with a disease condition. After the learning phase, the system is capable of diagnosing known cardiovascular conditions in patients.